When I was working in the hotel industry I constantly had to field a question from the elderly about their credit card info being stolen.
The key-cards that are issued for hotel rooms are nearly identical to credit cards. They are both magnetically encoded. A hotel room key=card is like a rewritable CD, and a credit card is like a single-write CD. Apparently their was a news report somewhere - which then got dispersed through the geriatric community - about a group of criminals who used hotel key-cards (rewritable CDs) to encode them with credit card information they had stolen elsewhere. OF course, this gets filtered down to "OMG! When the hotel clerk swipes your credit card, it puts your info on your room key and it gets stolen!"
PaulNikon
Palm Bay, FL
February 2003
JAN 20, 2012 09:14 PM